The Dispatch reports that City Council is considering ways to
reduce the number of shopping carts littering the streets of our
fair city. I have to agree: abandoned shopping carts are a
problem.
The Dispatch reports that City Council is considering ways to reduce the number of shopping carts littering the streets of our fair city. I have to agree: abandoned shopping carts are a problem. I live in the downtown. Shopping carts frequently clog the alleyways and festoon the parking strips.
Just yesterday, as I was coming out of my house, I noticed a small boy in the parking lot of the apartment across the street. He was playing with a big toy truck … but he was playing with it by pushing it around in a shopping cart.
I would be willing to bet that it never occurred to that child that the shopping cart he was playing with was stolen property, that it cost over $100. I hope it never occurred to his parents either. I would much rather believe that they never thought about it than that they intentionally stole and abandoned a cart.
Some stores have few problems with shopping cart theft. Nob Hill baggers walk customers out to their cars, load their groceries into their cars and bring back the carts. Safeway and Wal-mart have an anti-theft device called “the boot” installed on all carts: it triggers a wheel lock if the cart is taken too far from the store.
The city council is considering various measures: stores might be required to hire parking lot attendants, install “the boot” or use a European-model automated cart corral that requires a nominal security deposit which will be returned when the cart is returned.
The last method is tempting. Given the way aluminum and glass disappear out of my recycle bins, I can envision that if returning a shopping cart paid a dollar, the shopping carts currently cluttering the vacant lots and waterways would magically find their way home.
All the solutions under consideration by city council are flawed, however, because all place the burden on the store owner. The store owner is the victim here. The crime is theft, and the families who so casually “borrow” the carts and fail to return them are thieves. Stealing is against the law. So is littering.
I feel some sympathy for the families who borrow carts. In my car-less youth, I used to walk to the store, shop, and take all my groceries home in the store cart. But after unloading, I always walked the cart back to the store. Always. I had a horror of littering.
I would favor an approach that penalizes the thief and the litterbug more than the business owner. The city and the stores could collaborate to eliminate shopping cart theft.
They could collectively declare a two-week warning period. During this time, the cashiers should remind customers that removing carts form the store parking lots is a crime. Police should stop people who are traveling the city streets with shopping carts, inform them that they are in violation of the law, and let them off with a warning.
After the second week, the police can ticket. The danger of a $100 fine will eliminate the behavior in no time.
Underlying this whole issue is a philosophical point. As reported in The Dispatch, the call for council to consider a new ordinance is coming from Gilroy’s street maintenance workers, who find themselves retrieving abandoned carts several times a day from alleys, front lawns, sidewalks and vacant lots.
“The carts are all over the place'” said Carla Ruigh, Gilroy’s operations manager. “The city has to pick those carts up and either bring them back here to the Corporation Yard and have the stores pick them up, or return them ourselves. This is very costly to the public to have the staff constantly pick these up. And we can’t just leave them – they’re an eyesore.”
Here’s the point: when the government makes itself responsible for something, it ends up costing more money and curtailing people’s freedom. This is worth remembering when the government offers to do something “for free'” be it health care, education, public transit or universal pre-school. There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.
